


This is not a love story

by SecondSilk



Category: Torchwood
Genre: Gen, Grief, Suicide
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-10-10
Updated: 2010-10-10
Packaged: 2017-10-12 13:39:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 873
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/125450
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/SecondSilk/pseuds/SecondSilk
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There have been people whom Jack Harkness has loved.</p>
            </blockquote>





	This is not a love story

Jack Harkness falls in love. Which is to say that he has been known to fall in love. Which is to say that there have been people whom he's loved. There was a girl he might have married before he started training with the Time Authority, and a boy he almost married before he left. It's harder now, out of his own time, after the Doctor, after dying.

He liked Greece but he hated most of the twentieth Century. He's in Cardiff now, it's 2004, and he's waiting for a storm; a big, metaphoric, rip-the-world-open storm. But it will happen after the time he came here with Rose and met Mickey.

He has stopped measuring events by any sort of chronology.

Estelle passes him on the street and his heart stops. He thinks this might be how he goes: he can't be killed and he doesn't get sick, but something extraordinary, impossible in anyone else, lovesickness, one heart given to too many people. His heart beats again. He walks slowly back to headquarters, types her details into Tosh's computer and begins to think of explanations for what happened to the Yankee soldier she saw off to war forty years ago.

He should not have recognised her, with all her sixty years written on her face. She should have recognised him, unchanged. But that is one of the mysteries of love; it sees what it should not be able to, and ignores the things it must. He suspects she knows, anyway. There is something in the way she looks at him sometimes, passes him the milk, mentions the war, like an accusation, a demand for an explanation she does not want and he will not give.

When she dies, he feels a piece of himself pulled back into the blackness. Not enough to make him wish for more, not enough to let him think he might soon be free of life. Enough to hurt. Enough to remember.

Each day is a whole new day. To wake, dress, eat, look twice at Ianto, wonder at Owen's demons, count down the days until Gwen tells Rhys, until the Doctor returns. He will tell John it's just bearable, and that is not quite a lie. But here, sitting with a man who saw World War Two and likewise slipped through time, matching water to beer, Jack's stopped thinking about his own time, however he might measure it. He's simply watching John, and life is good.

The others, the girls, will cope better. Emma is young; she was setting out with the rest of her life ahead of her. Dianne has a naturally adventuring spirit. Jack could see her delight at the prospect of discovering a whole new world. No one before has flown a plane between times, and even her disappearing again is a moving forward. But John is his past and he has been taken too far away from it. He's falling. Jack knows it already. He doesn't want John to find out.

Jack remembers too much history. He sees his own ghosts in every street and everyday. A part of him would envy Alan's mind, and the way it has tangled itself inside, no longer recognising or being recognised by the outside world. But all of him and his mind is with John, trying as desperately as he knows how—which is less, now, than it used to be—to keep John on this plane.

Time was, Jack would have fought to keep John. He can feel the potential for that connection in the way he holds John now, their bodies pressed together, his hand in John's hair and John's tears dipping onto his collar. It's like a memory of a taste from a time before.

It could be easy to cup John's face and kiss him, to make him see that he still had a life to lead, even if it is not the life he imagined for himself. But it would be just as easy to destroy him here and now by taking from him the very last sense of himself, the only thing left that keeps him upright and alert as he agrees to come with Jack back to the base. Jack did not particularly enjoy the 1950s.

The base is cold and quiet when they return. Ianto is doing what he does when he isn't silently following orders, silently anticipating Jack's needs or silently undermining the security of Torchwood and the safety of the human race. Jack cannot spare any of the attention he has focussed on John, so he does not even know whether Ianto notices them, or whether he himself is upset by that. He can only save one person at a time.

It is Ianto who tells him John has gone, and Ianto who, silently, hands him his coat as he leaves.

It is just bearable for Jack. He knows that this is only true because he has people he loves and something he is waiting for, and because he has no choice. He envies the simplicity of John's existence; all his questions answered and his breath now stopped in his chest, the darkness welcomed. Jack sits, breathes poisoned air, still waiting for a storm or a resolution.


End file.
